Finally, near midnight, the meeting broke up. Men shook hands, drifted away in silence. Only Delaney and the radioman were left in the cabin. The Captain wanted to call Barbara, but thought it too late; she’d probably be sleeping. He wanted very much to talk to her.
He spent a few minutes getting his gear together, stuffing reports, schedules, and memos into manila envelopes. If all went well in the morning, he’d be back in Manhattan by noon, leading his little squad of cops home again.
He hadn’t realized how tired he was, how he longed for his own bed. Some of it was physical weariness: too many hours on his feet, muscles punished, nerves pulled and strained. But he also felt a spiritual exhaustion. This thing with Blank had gone on too long, had done too much to him.
Now, the last night, he pulled on cap and fur-lined greatcoat, plodded down to Devil’s Needle for a final look. It was colder, no doubt of that, and the smell of snow was in the air. The sentries circling the base of the rock wore rubber ponchos over their sheepskin jackets: the sniper was huddled under a blanket, only the glowing end of a cigarette showing in black shadow. Captain Delaney stood a little apart from the few gawkers still there, still staring upward.
The gleaming pillar of Devil’s Needle rose above him, probing the night sky, ghostly in the searchlight glare. About it, he thought he heard a faintly ululant wind, no louder than the cry of a distant child. He shivered inside his greatcoat: a chill of despair, a fear of something. It would have been easy, at that moment, to weep, but for what he could not have said.
It might, he thought dully, be despair for his own sins, for he suddenly knew he had sinned grievously, and the sin was pride. It was surely the most deadly; compared to pride, the other six seemed little more than physical excesses. But pride was a spiritual corruption and, worse, it had no boundaries, no limits, but could consume a man utterly.
In him, he knew, pride was not merely self-esteem, not just egotism. He knew his shortcomings better than anyone except, perhaps, his wife. His pride went beyond a satisfied self-respect; it was an arrogance, a presumption of moral superiority he brought to events, to people and. he supposed wryly, to God.
But now his pride was corroded by doubt. As usual, he had made a moral judgment-was that unforgivable for a cop? — and had brought Daniel G. Blank to this lonely death atop a cold rock. But what else could he have done?
There were, he now acknowledged sadly, several other courses that had been open to him if there had been a human softness in him, a sympathy for others, weaker than he, challenged by forces beyond their strength or control. He could have, for instance, sought a confrontation with Daniel Blank after he had discovered that damning evidence in the illegal search. Perhaps he could have convinced Blank to confess; if he had, Celia Montfort would be alive tonight, and Blank would probably be in an asylum. The story this revealed would have meant the end of Captain Delaney’s career, he supposed, but that no longer seemed of overwhelming importance.
Or he could have admitted the illegal search and at least attempted to obtain a search warrant. Or he could have resigned the job completely and left Blank’s punishment to a younger, less introspective cop.
“Punishment.” That was the key word. His damnable pride had driven him to making a moral judgment, and, having made it, he had to be cop, judge, jury. He had to play God; that’s where his arrogance had led him.
Too many years as a cop. You started on the street, settling family squabbles, a Solomon in uniform; you ended hounding a man to his death because you knew him guilty and wanted him to suffer for his guilt. It was all pride, nothing but pride. Not the understandable, human pride of doing a difficult job well, but an overweening that led to judging him, then to condemning, then to executing. Who would judge, condemn, and execute Captain Edward X. Delaney?
Something in his life had gone wrong, he now saw. He was not born with it. It did not come from genes, education, or environment, any more than Blank’s homicidal mania had sprung from genes, education, or environment. But circumstances and chance had conspired to debase him, even as Daniel Blank had been perverted.
He did not know all things and would never know them; he saw that now. There were trends, currents, tides, accidents of such complexity that only an unthinking fool would say, “I am the master of my fate.” Victim, Delaney thought. We are all victims, one way or another.
But, surprisingly, he did not feel this to be a gloomy concept, nor an excuse for licentious behavior. We are each dealt a hand at birth and play our cards as cleverly as we can, wasting no time lamenting that we received only one pair instead of a straight flush. The best man plays a successful game with a weak hand-bluffing, perhaps, when he has to-but staking everything, eventually, on what he’s holding.
Captain Delaney thought now he had been playing a poor hand. His marriage had been a success, and so had his career. But he knew his failures…he knew. Somewhere along the way humanity had leaked out of him, compassion drained, pity became dry and withered. Whether it was too late to become something other than what he was, he did not know. He might try-but there were circumstance and chance to cope with and, as difficult, the habits and prejudices of more years than he cared to remember.
Uncertain, shaken, he stared upward at Devil’s Needle, shaft toppling, world tilting beneath his tread. He was anxious and confused, sensing he had lost a certitude, wandered from a faith that, right or wrong, had supported him.
He felt something on his upturned face: a light, cold tingle of moisture. Tears? Just the first frail snowflakes. He could see them against the light: a fragile lacework. At that moment, almost hearing it, he knew the soul of Daniel Blank had escaped the flesh and gone winging away into the darkness, taking with it Captain Delaney’s pride.
Shortly before dawn the snowfall dissolved into a freezing rain. Then that too ceased. When Captain Delaney came out on the porch at 8:30 a.m., the ground was a blinding diamond pave; every black branch in sight was gloved with ice sparkling in the new sun.
He wore his greatcoat when he walked over to the van for black coffee and a doughnut. The air was clear, chill, almost unbearably sharp-like breathing ether. There was a chiselled quality to the day, and yet the world was not clear: a thin white scrim hung between sun and earth; the light was muted.
He went back to the shack and instructed the radioman to plug in an auxiliary microphone, a hand-held model with an extension cord so he could stand out on the porch, see the top of Devil’s Needle above the skeleton trees, and communicate with Chilton Two and Chilton Three.
The ambulance rolled slowly into the compound. Chief Forrest climbed out, puffing, to direct its parking. A stretcher and body bag were removed; the two attendants went back into the warmth of the cab, smoking cigarettes. Captain Sneed showed a squad of ten men where they were to take up their positions, handling his duties with the solemnity of an officer arranging the defense of the Alamo. But Delaney didn’t interfere; it made no difference. Finally Forrest and Sneed came up to join the Captain on the porch. They exchanged nods. Sneed looked at his watch. “Take-off about now,” he said portentously.
Chief Forrest was the first to hear it. “Coming,” he said, raised his old field glasses to his eyes, searched northward. A few minutes later Captain Delaney heard the fluttering throb of the helicopter and, shortly afterward, looking where Forrest was pointing, saw it descending slowly, beginning a tilted circle about Devil’s Needle.
The radio crackled.
“Chilton One from Chilton Two. Do you read me?” It was Major Samuel Barnes’ tight, rapid voice, partly muffled by the throb of rotors in the background.